1. Field of Art
This disclosure generally relates to attributing conversion credit for transactions by consumers to advertising modalities.
2. Background
Advertisers may place advertisements to be viewed by a potential customer through a variety of advertising modalities. Advertising modalities are the mechanisms and methods by which an advertisement is delivered to a customer and may be characterized by a variety of attributes. For example, an attribute can include a particular channel of advertising distribution, such as a weekly flier, an email service, text messages, or internet advertisements (e.g. video, banner, and search ads on any form of digital content). Other attributes can include the time of day the message was posted or delivered, the size and shape of the advertisement, and the type of advertising, such as text, pictorial, or video advertising. The same potential customer (or “user”) may be provided multiple advertisements by various modalities for the same advertiser. For example, a user may receive various advertising related to an advertiser, such as by a television advertisement in the morning, a small picture advertisement on an internet website at lunchtime, a text message as the user drives past the advertiser on the way home, and a large video advertisement on another internet website in the evening.
When the user views the advertisement, or at a later time, the user may visit the advertiser and perform a desired activity. This desired activity is termed a conversion. For many advertisers, a conversion is a product purchase, though the conversion may also be completing a survey, electing to receive additional information, or otherwise positively interacting with the advertiser. Conversion events are defined by the advertiser and broadly can be any event where a monetary value can be associated with the user activity.
Once a given user converts following exposure to the advertisers advertisements, it can be difficult for the advertiser to determine the contribution to the user's conversion of each different advertising modality that provided an advertisement to the user prior to the conversion. Since many conversions are the result of a user viewing several advertisements for the advertiser from various content providers, standard conversion attribution techniques, such as “last viewed,” undervalue the contribution of earlier advertisements in convincing the user to convert to the advertiser. These techniques may also fail to account for multiple conversion events for the same user.